Thursday 9 February 2012 16.00 EST
First published on Thursday 9 February 2012 16.00 EST

Apprenticeship – the word warms the cockles of politicians' hearts. David Cameron and Nick Clegg boast frequently of increasing apprenticeships by a remarkable 60%.

It's National Apprenticeship Week – but the coalition should perhaps have quietly dropped it, along with so much support for the young. The new apprenticeships they claim are almost a lie, at least nowhere near the truth. As youth unemployment climbs – now at 22.3% – the number of apprenticeships for 16 to 18 year-olds fell in the last three months.

Cameron and Clegg certainly know the truth about their "60% increase". They may get lost in thickets of vocational initials – BTecs, HNDs, GNVQs – while knowing every detail about whether an A* will help Oxbridge select the very best. But they love the word "apprenticeship", with its sepia image of a young man at a lathe under the watchful eye of a master craftsman, the sealing wax on his seven-year articles ensuring lifelong, worthwhile work.

However, most "modern apprenticeships", as in secondary modern, are a world away from medieval guilds. The last government devalued the word, but this government trashed it when it took Labour's Train to Gain scheme for older employees, cut the funds and rebadged it as "apprenticeships". That created an instant 257% increase in "apprenticeships" as short courses for over-25s, most already working at Asda, Morrisons or McDonald's. Worthwhile maybe, but not "apprenticeships", wasting scarce state funds on company training.

Here's an enjoyable statistic: in the last year "apprenticeships" for the over- 60s rose by 878%. Cuts in the training/apprenticeship budget are disguised by plentiful announcements of little pots of money for small new schemes: Cameron did it again this week with £6m for high-quality apprenticeships. The worst scandal is that so many "apprenticeships" are 12-week courses from private training companies, with no jobs at the end. That revelation forced the government to promise all future apprenticeships for 16 to 18 year-olds must last a year – but not for 19 to 24 year-olds.

Britain is the only country that outsources apprenticeships: elsewhere they are a bond between employers and trainees. Take the retail apprenticeship, a weak, lowly esteemed course in generic basics. Professor Lorna Unwin of the Institute for Education says German retail apprentices learn the detail of, say, delicatessen, or electrical sales. "They learn all about the products they sell, along with maths and literacy. It's a regulated occupation, where you can only be apprenticed under a meister for at least two and often four years. No wonder Comet goes to the wall when staff have no idea what they're selling." That applies to low-grade social care courses: in Nordic countries nursery nursing is mostly graduate level. That goes to the heart of the matter, a reflection on a whole society's deep values.

The state intervenes too little too late: the vaunted Work Programme takes only one in 10 of the young, with under-19s left out. There are just 50,000 subsidised jobs, spending half the OECD average. The Association of Colleges reports alarmingly that the number of 16 to 19 year-olds with fewest qualifications enrolling for basic courses (level 1) has fallen, in some areas by up to 15%. Why? The abolition of the education maintenance allowance (EMA) and transport price rises. Barnardo's reports this week on harm done by the loss of EMAs, its chief executive abandoning politically cautious language: "It's an absolute disgrace that some students are forced to skip meals in order to afford the bus to college. Our most vulnerable young people may lose the opportunity to improve their life chances." Axing Connexions, which reached out to young people adrift, means no one guides them towards college. The replacement careers service will offer limited online or phone advice.

The Acevo-Miliband report shows how unemployment scars the young for life. Britain's education was always excellent at the top – the problem is the bottom 30%. Their low political status means further education colleges offering second chances get one-third less funding than schools teaching A-levels – and no free school meals.

Class cuts like a knife through everything as the government blames "low aspiration", chivvying the young into weak schemes with no jobs at the end. Chicken and egg: why should a society bother with expensive training for low-paid, undervalued workers in retail, social care or nurseries? A culture that pays so many people so little for essential work will never improve opportunities for those it undervalues from birth.